After various studies during 2026, Ahrefs presents its report on the reality of AI search: AI Overviews reduce organic traffic by 58%, YouTube is a key factor for AI visibility, and 28% of pages cited by ChatGPT do not appear on Google.
Ahrefs, a leading digital marketing platform, publishes the report 'The Reality of AI Search in 2026', a compilation of over 12 independent analyses —based on over 146 million SERPs, 730,000 AI responses, 150 million prompts, and 75,000 brands, among other datasets— which reveals how artificial intelligence is transforming online search, what factors determine whether a brand appears recommended by ChatGPT, Gemini, or Google's AI Overviews, and why brands that start measuring and optimizing their AI visibility now will have an advantage over those who arrive late. The complete Ahrefs report can be accessed here.
AI visibility has been measured with Ahrefs' Brand Radar, the largest AI visibility database on the market, with 400 million monthly prompts across seven platforms —AI Overviews, AI Mode, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot, and Grok— backed by real searches from Ahrefs' big data.
Key Findings
- Google sends 190 times more visits than ChatGPT to websites and accounts for 40% of total traffic. However, the real impact of AI is harder to measure: many users who discover a brand through ChatGPT later go directly to the website or search for the brand on Google, leaving no trace in traditional analytics. Hence, the importance of incorporating new metrics. Brands that work both channels will have a greater advantage.
- AI Overviews reduce visits to Google's first result by 58%. The impact extends to the entire page: the second position loses 50.8% and the tenth, 19.4%. Optimizing visibility in AI is no longer a future option.
- Web mentions and YouTube are the factors that most influence AI visibility. In the analysis of 75,000 brands, YouTube mentions lead the correlation with a coefficient of 0.737 in ChatGPT, AI Mode, and AI Overviews. And web mentions remain key to AI visibility across all platforms studied. Above backlinks, domain authority, or content volume. They are actionable factors today, in a phase where most brands are not yet actively working on them.
- Content length does not determine if AI cites you. After analyzing 174,000 pages cited in AI Overviews, no data was shown to demonstrate a preference between short and long content. What matters is the relevance and clarity of the answer, not its length.
- AIs can spread false information about any brand. Gemini and Perplexity reproduced disinformation in 37-39% of their responses in the Ahrefs experiment; ChatGPT-4 and ChatGPT-5, in less than 7%. Monitoring what models say about a brand becomes a necessity for any business. Those who do it sooner will be better positioned to protect and manage their reputation in AI.
- Blog listings, which often appear as "The best x," represent 43.8% of the URL sources cited by ChatGPT in top-of-the-funnel queries, brand awareness phase. Detecting which listings and platforms competitors appear on —and which ones the brand itself does not appear on— in a tool like Brand Radar, is one of the easiest strategies to implement in the short term.
Appearing in the top Google results is the foundation, but it's not everything
Search engine optimization — known as SEO — remains the foundation of online visibility and Google continues to be the main source of web traffic, sending 190 times more visits than ChatGPT. However, data reveals that ranking well on Google no longer guarantees appearing in AI responses: 28% of the pages most cited by ChatGPT do not rank on Google, and only 38% of those cited in AI Overviews appear in the top 10.
Many of the practices that work for SEO coincide with what is known as AEO — Answer Engine Optimization. Building thematic authority by covering a topic in depth, keeping content updated, getting mentions — in the case of SEO, links — on authoritative websites, or ensuring that bots can correctly crawl and index the website are practices that benefit both Google rankings and visibility in AI responses. The difference is that each platform applies its own criteria independently — ChatGPT, AI Overviews, and Perplexity barely share 14% of the domains they cite among themselves — which makes it necessary to measure each channel separately. The Ahrefs team has published a complete course on AEO for those who want to delve deeper into how to appear in AI responses.
The sector is still in its early stages, and brands that start working on these factors before their competition will have a stronger position when this channel matures. Ahrefs' Brand Radar allows for this tracking: it identifies in which ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, or AI Overviews responses a brand appears and how often; it detects industry topics where competitors are already being cited but the brand is not yet; and it points out which publications and websites have the greatest influence on AI visibility, directing marketing efforts towards where they actually generate impact.